


An infusion of wormwood

by Serpensortia_parapluie



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Don't copy to another site, Language of Flowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-11-01 15:26:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17869826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serpensortia_parapluie/pseuds/Serpensortia_parapluie
Summary: Harry Potter has an unusual hobby that allows him to interpret a question in a way entirely unintended.





	An infusion of wormwood

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Apologies for my long absence, have a drabble. I do not own, nor am I associated with the owners of _Harry Potter_. I do not give my permission for my works to be posted on sites like Goodreads. Please leave a comment with constructive criticism or at least a :) or an ! if you liked it.

Harry Potter has an unusual hobby.

Not many people know about it, mostly because at this point in his life, Harry only knew a few people as anything other than nodding acquaintances.

Uncle Vernon and his cousin Dudley didn’t know about his hobby. The hobby and Harry aren’t anything they care about, and neither was it anything freakish, just odd, so as far as they were concerned, Harry having interests of his own didn’t register.

No one at primary knew, mainly because Dudley made sure that Harry didn’t have any friends there he could have shared it with, had he desired to.

Mrs. Figg, the batty old cat lady Aunt Petunia sometimes had watch over Harry when she did her errands didn’t know either, since all she cared to talk or hear about was her horde of cats.

No one at Hogwarts knew either, this time because this was only his second day there at all and Harry didn’t know anyone well enough yet- regardless of how friendly Ron Weasley had been so far.

To be honest, only one other person in Harry’s life knew about his unusual hobby, and then it was only because she started him on it.

It’s tradition in the Evans family that girl children be named after flowers, and as a young girl herself, Petunia had grown fascinated with flower meanings.

Aunt Petunia’s first calm words to Harry were an absent aside after he’d asked why Uncle Vernon gave her roses and what did they mean, “My name and the flower it comes from means anger and resentment. Your mother’s meant humility, devotion and restored innocence after death. I always thought that was cruel of our parents to name us so.”

Aunt Petunia didn’t share his passion for learning the entire language of flowers, an often contradictory and perplexing sort of pastime. But neither did she discourage him from it. She even went so far as to encourage it, because while it was an interest more typical of girls and thus abnormal in her eyes, it was something completely non-magical. She even fancied that perhaps the boy could grow up to be something utterly normal and unremarkable, like a gardener, or maybe even a florist.

The only gift Harry ever received from his aunt was a well-worn and second hand copy of a Victorian flower dictionary, for his ninth birthday. It was old and worn out, with dog-eared pages and crumpled covers. It was also musty and its pages were wavy, signs that the poor thing had suffered from water damage at some point.

It used old and outdated phrases and vocabulary that Harry had to stumble his way through understanding- sometimes with the help of a dictionary during his lunch period at school, and included some very obscure flowers he’d never heard of before.

He treasured it deeply, and read it cover to cover so many times that eventually he could pick a random flower from any garden and recite its meaning and then combine it with other flowers to create a message.

Or, in this case, to interpret a message.

_“What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?”_

Asphodel is a type of lily, and most often represents death. Sometimes, it can mean ‘my regrets follow you to the grave’.

Wormwood means bitter regret, or bitter sorrow.

If this were a bouquet, Harry’d almost think… Loosely interpreted, it could mean “I (the giver of the flowers) bitterly regret someone’s (someone possibly named Lily) death.”

Harry’s mum’s name was Lily, and Professor Snape is about the age she would have been, had she lived.

He has to ask.

“Professor, did you just tell me you bitterly regret my mum’s death?”

**Author's Note:**

> That's it, that's all she wrote. Sorry, this fought me the whole way and refused to be more. It feels done enough for me. I'm sure this idea has been covered before- I have seen headcanons about the meaning of Snape's little quiz, though years ago now and I don't recall where or who- please tell me if you have an idea of where I found this idea- somewhere on tumblr and also on Pottermore, I believe. The line in italics should be directly taken from the book, if my memory has not failed me.  
> Fun facts time:  
> 1) my notes are literally: “Did you just say, ‘I bitterly regret… etc’ to me in flower, Professor?”  
> 2) I literally just Googled for flower meanings, and went with the ones that proved my point. I would make a bad scientist, since I'm pretty sure that kind of thing's called an _affirmation bias_ , or something like that.


End file.
